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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

i started working on ubuntu but i was not accustomed to gnome desktop
so i got kubuntu which was like kde+ubuntu without gnome
i got kubuntu installed
it has a good desktop ,one of the best i have seen on linux
.it is quite stable too,but again not all packages can be bundled in a single CD,so i installed all the extra packages like gnome dektop ,firefox form the ubit CD that i had.
and i was able to work in a debain environment ,so i like kubuntu and would recommend it

I started using Mandrake Linux which is an excellent newb linux OS. I quickly got hooked on the ease of URPMI and the ability to download and install almost anything with it. It was also nice to be able to do some of the nitty gritty myself when needed. Soon I felt I was missing something with Mandrake though and started hunting for a better distro.

I came accross Ubunto and Kubuntu. Of course I hate Gnome so I choose Kubunto. From the website seeing it is only one CD is already a plus. Most distros are 3/4 cd's while this one is only one. A big plus in my book.

I missed the nice Gui for the install but the text based installer was powerfull and very easy to use. Any newbie can easily install Kubuntu with this installer and any linux guru can get a little more nitty gritty also with it. It mixes the best of both worlds. The only thing I didnt like is that the installer automatically tried to set up my NIC with DHCP, rather then giving me the option to manually set it up first. It's no big deal as it fails anyway then gives me the option to manually set it, but I would have rather done that to begin with. Hardware detection was superb also.

After doing the initial install it used apt-get to download and install the rest of the setup. Not bad for me as I have DSL but those of you with 56k beware. This took up very little extra time.

Once in Kubuntu youll quickly realize that there is no root. instead they used the "sudo" command. You can still enable the root account so it's no big deal, but something to get used to also.

The new KDE 3.4 is amazingly faster then KDE 3.2 or 3.3. It also looks and feels much nicer.

Everything about kubuntu so far checks out greatly. All programs run smoothly. It's stable so far with very few bugs albeit a couple small ones. And it overall plays nice.

My only grudge so far is that the standard apt-get repositories that are standard are piss poor. All though they have other good ones listed in they config file they are commented out and you must go through the trouble of uncommenting them. A minor inconvience, but an inconvience none the less escpially to a newb just discovering the idea of the portage system.

My experience with Hoary Hedgehog (Kubuntu 5.04) was very positive. This distro is perfect for anyone that doesn't want to take much time or effort to get a linux box set up.

The installation was a breeze. It took all of about 15-25 minutes, and left me with no questions, or guesses. The best part is, it configures GRUB for you. I only had one problem with the automatic GRUB configuration. If I have both my SATA (Primary) and ATA (emergency backup) HDD's connected, it puts all the grub entries as (hd1,x) instead of (hd0,x), therefore making it impossible to boot from the grub menu. However, I was able to startup from the command line, and then manually change menu.lst. Other than that Installation was flawless.

Once I rebooted into my new Ubuntu system it installed all the packages, and once that was complete I had KDE up and ready to go. Almost everything seems to run well while working in KDE. The system seems overall surprisingly very responsive for a user-friendly distro, and I rarely experience any locks or crashes.

There is one problem with KDE though. Whenever I try to edit users using the KDE user management program (I think its called KUser), it crashes everytime I try to save a user's information. No problem, I can just do them in the terminal.

It doesn't come with as many programs as I would like to, but it has apt get which is a good package manager. I don't have internet though, so I am pretty much out of luck.

Overall, I think Kubuntu is an excellent distro. It isn't a very customizable distro, but it isn't meant to be very customizable. Kubuntu is exactly what it is meant to be: a userfriendly, easy to use and install distro.

I have used distros like Redhat 7.3, Fedora Core 1, Mandrake 10.1 Official, SuSE 9.1 Personal before I came up with Kubuntu 5.10 (Breezy).
My PC is an i686, Pentium 933 Copermine with 128 MB RAM over an intel 82810E Chipset Motherboard which has 4 MB onboard VGA and an Ac'97 onboard sound card.
Till now, my favourite distro was SuSE 9.1. I used Yahoo Messenger, Skype, Mplayer, XMMS, FireFox and many other applications with a nice performance.
As I like using diffrent distros, I was now willing to try my hands on some Debian based distro. So, I came to know from a guy in this forum about Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
I didn't waste any more time and the next day Kubuntu 5.10 was on my desktop. I was really impressed by the Look and Feel it gave me. Although, as there's no inbuilt support for Flash, MPEG, mp3 files by default, SuSE 9.1 seem to be more good to me. Anyway, I tried some googling over it and finally did some fiddling with the sudo and apt-get. Within minutes my computer was ready with all the stuff I needed. Firefox, XMMS, MPlayer, GAIM (Instant Messenger with Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk, etc). I configured SAMBA, Internet Conncection Sharing, put in some startup scripts for iptables, etc with the help of the Ubuntu forums. It was really easy. Then I tried Skype (for debian). After SuSE 9.1, only Kubuntu was the one to provide me the proper functionality of Skype. Right now, while writing this review, I am on Kubuntu 5.10. I am really satisfied with the distro and I plan it to use it for longer enough before getting hands on any other one.
To conclude, I would say, it's a really nice distro for beginners as well as well as the experienced ones.